When one thinks of Scotland, one might conjure up images of the hauntingly beautiful and bleak highlands. A place that breeds a sinewy and humorous people. Names like Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Agnes Campbell, Adam Smith, and David Hume come to mind. 

How things change.

Nineteen centuries after the Romans were repelled by the Highland tribes, a Scottish man named Leslie Sinclair was turned away from donating blood after he refused to answer whether he was pregnant. 

Mr Sinclair, 66, had donated 125 pints of blood over his adult life, worthy of a Knighthood in itself. Heeding the call of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service when donations waned during the pandemic, Mr Sinclair was faced with a new ‘yes or no’ question on the safety form. It asked whether he was pregnant or had been pregnant in the past six months.

The mandatory question was added for ‘inclusiveness’. When Mr Sinclair pointed out that this does not apply to a man, and therefore he shouldn’t have to answer it, the clinic told him that they cannot accept his much-needed blood.

Unwilling to play their games, Mr Sinclair left on his bicycle. He said:

‘It is nonsensical and it makes me angry because there are vulnerable people waiting for blood, including children, and in desperate need of help. But they’ve been denied my blood because of the obligation to answer a question that can’t possibly be answered.’

Bravo Mr Sinclair. 

In recent years, the battle over sexual identity has reached a boiling point. It has become increasingly clear that proponents who wish to blur the reality of sexual bifurcation, something we have understood for millennia, are indoctrinating children. 

This deliberate attempt to fabricate a false consensus is permeating top-down. For instance, the recently appointed US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, when pressed, famously could not define what a woman is, stating as defense that ‘I’m not a biologist’. 

She is nevertheless lauded as the first black woman Supreme Court Justice; a lady in her fifties and a mother of two. Still, Justice Jackson will be interpreting the Constitution and affecting various laws in America, including on abortion, which may involve this amorphous group known as ‘women’. One hopes she will get a biology degree in the meantime. 

The American Medical Association pushed to eliminate having the sex of the newborn stated on birth certificates. According to AMA Board Chair Dr Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, noting the sex of the newborn may ‘[stifle] an individual’s self-expression and self-identification and contributes to marginalisation and minoritisation’. 

Dr Fryhofer should know that sex plays an important role in diagnosis and treatment. As if to present this deliberate confusion at its farcical apex, in 2019, a nurse treating a transgender man with abdominal pain failed to realise that what was faced was not an obese man who overindulged but actually a biological woman experiencing a difficult labour. The nurse did not treat it as an emergency and the baby was stillborn. 

The pandemic-induced home-schooling has alerted many parents of what’s actually been taught to their children. Not only do some in the education sector feel that it is appropriate to teach preschool-aged children sexualised subjects and transgenderism in particular, they even go behind the parents’ backs to promote gender transition. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of people find this to be wrong, and, like Mr Sinclair, are having none of it. 

In Florida, the Parental Rights in Education Bill, baselessly smeared as the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill by progressive media, was passed. It bans teachers from teaching inappropriate topics such as sexual orientation and identity to children under nine years of age, and has proven to be popular even among Democrats. 

In Massachusetts, parents are suing Ludlow Public Schools as the staff continued to converse with their 11-12-year-olds about sexuality and to promote transgenderism, against their expressed wishes. 

Three mothers have filed a federal lawsuit against a school in Pennsylvania for teaching their first-grade children about gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning. 

In New York, city council member Vickie Paladino and others are speaking out against the spending of more than $200,000 tax payers’ dollars to send drag queens to public schools and libraries to read to children, often without parental knowledge or consent. Many books read promote transgender ideology, asking kids to ‘circle your pronouns’ and ‘find your own drag name’. 

Gender dysphoria is a rare condition that affects a fraction of 1 per cent. People who genuinely have this condition deserve respect, like any other. However, the recent attempts at indoctrinating children has resulted in an explosion of gender confusion, especially in young girls. This is likely due to a phenomenon of peer contagion, where the normal pangs and anxieties of adolescence is falsely attributed to be signs of latent transgenderism. The herding of impressionable children towards gender confusion and irreversible therapies and surgery is immoral, especially as research show that gender dysphoria in children resolves itself in 80 per cent of cases. 

More and more people are speaking out against this cultural putsch, from writers Abigail Shrier, J.K. Rowling, and Lionel Shriver, to feminist icons Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, and even transgender people like Caitlin Jenner and Blaire White.

Perhaps as a result of the grassroots push-back, FINA, and the International Rugby League have both banned transgender women from competition against biological women. 

But what this strange episode in history shows is that institutions have failed to safeguard us against lunacy. It is therefore up to the average person, who can, with a little bit of pluck like Mr Sinclair, stand firm against the onslaught of ideological rubbish. 

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